Monday, June 23, 2014

What Happened in Chicago

Just as I had done the other day, taking my time to wander
through lists of any documentation I could find on Ancestry.com for descendants
of the Homer Fulk family, I spent yesterday camped out in the world of
historical newspaper archives. Bit by bit, I’m hoping to reconstruct the
descendant lines of our Kelly ancestors in Lafayette, Indiana.

After the arrival in Lafayette
of the Kelly family from their undisclosed hometown in Ireland, it hadn’t taken long for the branches
of Bridget Kelly Creahan’s family to disperse beyond the Indiana county where they originally
settled. Oldest daughter Ella had married Homer Fulk, son of a state senator
from Bloomington, nearly one hundred miles south
of Lafayette.
While we’ve already traced as much of the life of her youngest son, Lyman Fulk,
as can be found in Indiana—and the few hints we’ve found, indicating the family’s
move to Tennessee—it appears that Ella’s other two children headed, upon
adulthood, in the opposite direction.

Chicago had been the destination
for Homer and Ella’s daughter Mary who, as we’ve already discussed, married a Chicago man named Charles
Slater. That city also became home to Mary’s brother, Robert Fulk—or, as he
constantly was listed in Cook
County records, Robert “Faulk.”

It was thanks to the many tidbits on the social pages of Bloomington, Indiana,
newspapers that I could piece together Robert’s life during the years from the
mid 1910s through early 1920s. On page four of The Bloomington Evening World on October 12, 1916, I gained my
first clue from the explanation of Ella’s current housekeeping arrangements:

Mrs. Ella Fulk, who
has been making her home with her son, Lyman Fulk, south College Avenue, will
go to Chicago tomorrow for a visit with her son, Robert.

Over the years, there would be many such entries in the
Bloomington newspapers, with Ella noted as traveling to Chicago, or returning
from Chicago—along with her trips back to Lafayette to visit her brother John Creahan
and sister Anna Quinlisk.

At one point, though, the newspaper actually provided a
report of substance. The October 22, 1917 edition of The Bloomington Evening World mentioned that

Mrs. Ella Fulk has
returned from a two months visit in Chicago.
Mrs. Fulk went especially to attend the wedding of her son, Robert Fulk to Miss
Gertrude Pryor.

Now, that was
information! It was hard to zero in on someone with a name like Robert Fulk in
a place as large as Chicago.
Especially considering that his surname was routinely re-invented as Faulk, I
couldn’t be sure the results Ancestry.com was delivering were for the right
man. Checking on a marriage record for Gertrude Pryor gave me a second way to
verify I had the right person.

Of course, I hadn’t banked on the possibility that Gertrude,
herself, might have had a second identity. The Bloomington newspaper must not have
considered it quite proper to mention that Robert had, ahem, decided to marry a
woman who was not exactly a “Miss.” Gertrude, in fact, had not only been
previously married, but apparently was also mother to two children.

Not that that situation was rare or looked down upon. I can’t
possibly read between the lines to decipher why the newspaper had reported the
marriage the way it had. But in Cook
County, the 1917 marriage record showed Gertrude as the former Mrs. Hopkinson. It was easy, in the subsequent census report less than three years after their marriage, to tell that the two
children listed as Harriet and Charles “Faulk” were too old to have been Robert’s
own descendants.

What was eerie about that 1920 census, though—enumerated on
January 20 through 21—was that it was taken only days before Gertrude’s own
passing. I wasn’t aware of that turn of events until I found—again, through
NewspaperArchive.com—an article in the February 12 edition of The Bloomington Evening World:

Mrs. Ella Fulk
received word this morning of the death of her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Robert
Fulk, of Chicago.
Death was due to pneumonia. Mrs. Fulk was unable to go on account of illness
but her son, Lyman, left for Chicago
this morning.

I wondered, after that point, what had become of Gertrude’s two children. Already suffering the loss of one parent, they now faced this
second bereavement. Did the census listing showing the two as Harriet and Charles
Faulk—instead of Hopkinson—indicate that Robert had legally adopted these two
step-children? I couldn’t tell, because I was unable to find Robert in any
subsequent census reports, despite taking the time to linger on Ancestry.com
and explore all the hints and possibilities.

It wasn’t the historic newspaper collection that told me the
rest of the story, this time. Instead, I had to jump over to FamilySearch.org—which
I find to be a great working partner to Ancestry.com—to uncover what had become of Robert
Fulk in Chicago.

Just as Chicago had not been good for Robert’s sister, Mary—who
had died young after moving to the city, herself—and just as it had not been a
supportive milieu for Robert’s new wife, the city did not serve Robert well, either. Perhaps it later became the source of unbearable memories for him—or perhaps
it just was too unhealthy an environment. It is hard to tell from what little
documentation I’ve so far been able to locate. All I know is that, only four
years after losing his wife, the forty year old Robert, himself, died in Cook County, Illinois,
on January 16, 1924.

8 comments:

Pneumonia. That has been coming up a lot recently in my own research. This story of Robert and Gertrude is like a microcosm of the genealogist's experience: one ancestor requires endless effort to find any detail while another pops in relatively easily and is gone just as quickly.

Isn't that the case, Wendy?! I feel like I need to take a long and hard second look when documents pop up "too" easily.

Interesting that you are also running into quite a bit of that diagnosis of pneumonia as well. In this case, as you'll see tomorrow, I wonder if that was an entirely correct diagnosis. Keeping in mind how many cases of tuberculosis I've run into in this time period from that city--and coupling that with other details--it just makes me wonder what was really going on.

I keep wondering that, myself, Far Side. I'm presuming they were taken in by someone else in Gertrude's family--or possibly someone from Mr. Hopkinson's side of their family. Of course, in those times when so many died young, it could be possible that there were no more surviving family members to help out in this situation. Curiosity may get the best of me and push me to go back and find out what I can find on this question....

That's an interesting question, Iggy. It appears the two addresses were about 15 miles apart. However, I doubt Frank's family was aware of Robert Fulk. Robert's maternal grandmother was sister to Will Stevens' paternal grandmother, which made the two men second cousins. However, in between their concurrent moves to Chicago, Robert's family had moved from Lafayette to Bloomington while Will's family had moved to Fort Wayne. At the point in which Robert lost his wife, Frank--one generation removed from this set of second cousins--wasn't even born yet.

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It is my contention that, after a lifetime, one of the greatest needs people have is to be remembered. They want to know: have I made a difference?
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